“Hilarious look at oldtimers hockey and the horror that is a smelly bag”

STEPHANIE MYLES
The Gazette

This book is Dan Jenkins funny, laugh-out-loud-and-hope-nobody-asks-why funny.

You don’t have to have played a shift of oldtimers’ hockey to laugh. And you’ll probably find it hysterical even if you don’t think poop and burp jokes are funny because Bill Gaston, who has written 10 other works, is the perfect guy to write it.

Gaston, now 53, played some serious hockey in his day. So when he says he “used to be good,” he’s one of the few who can back it up. And his ability to find all that is amusing and ironic in human nature, his perceptiveness, and his willingness to bring the stinkiest hockey bag into the room means he has all the bases covered.

But if you’ve played hockey at any level, you’ll not only find yourself in the book; you’ll find every guy you ever played with.

The laugh-out-loud moments are too numerous to single out just a few. But we’ll start with some of the chapter titles.

Beer. … To Hangummup or Not to Hangummup. … I’m the best player on the team, but nobody sees it yet. … Road trip!

Nasty extramarital sex: what teammates have done it, what cities they live in, and here are their names (no, he doesn’t).

One hundred French guys and me. … Old men showering naked.

And then there are the team names: The Draught Picks, the Dung Beetles, the Wounded Moose, Soup and Fish, the Fogduckers, the Vasectomites, Friends of Jesus, the Flapping Dongalingers.

There is the Surrey (B.C.) Red Army, whose players all have names on their jerseys like “McLeanov,” “Reganov” and “Smithtov.” And there is one of Gaston’s first oldtimer teams, the Fredericton Stinkhorns.

Google it, if you must; it’s a fungus, and its shape is rather suggestive to say the least.

Gaston relates some other experiences. While playing hockey at UBC, he went on a long trip to China, Hong Kong and Japan, which was an eye-opener. And he spent a year as a player-coach for a truly awful French team, Toulon in La Ligue du Sud.

Most of his players there spent their weekdays anchored offshore in a Navy submarine then drifted into town for games, eschewing cotton undershirts under their jerseys for Band-aids placed over their nipples.

He discusses dozens of life-or-death topics. The difference between oldtimers hockey and beer-league hockey. Why Saturday night just won’t do to play, and Sunday night is just weird. How old injuries eventually morph into “old” injuries, like dislocating a finger tightening skate laces. How “training camp” is really just “one single, five-minute, near-fatal jog.”

Gaston explores the phenomenon of why the worst player on your team is always the one who constantly whines, yells at, and otherwise tries to coach the other players. He explains why old guys still fight (“every once in a while, they have to check and make sure that Everyone Is Still Afraid of Them”).

He debates the best way for your oldtimers team to be run: democracy, or dictatorship?

And he ponders the greater conundrum: why travel so far to play in a weekend oldtimers’ tournament?

“The prize is the kind of T-shirt you hesitate donning even to go upside down under the toilet pipes. Or a cheap windbreaker that smells like Dow Chemical,” he writes. “Even more perverse, the biggest reason for winning your first three games is the bonus of getting to play yet another game on Sunday, and this after you have enjoyed your second drunken, sleepless night in a row.”

There was the time Gaston left a bag of kiwi fruit in his bag for five months over the summer. And he has two cats, one of which “likes” his gear, especially the knee pads. There was the guy who came in one fall with a wasp’s nest having appeared in his bag. Another had to kill the dozen baby mice nesting in his bag when he pulled it out after having been “retired” a year.

The “bad bag” seems to be a perverse pride thing. Woe to the “good-bag” guy – the guy who probably even washes his bag – who dares to complain.

“Yes, good-bag guy, the rest of us are watching you and we scorn you. At home, you probably rinse your can opener after every use,” he writes.

The faint of heart should probably skip the vivid description on page 175 of a prank involving underwear, peanut butter, and a player named “Vlad the Impaler.

But it sure sounds like fun.

“Oldtimers hockey players only act dumb for a few hours a week, and they actually lead other lives,” Gaston writes. “In life, nothing is so delicious as anticipating that next hockey game.

“Well, maybe sex, food and maybe also shelter during a storm. But a hockey game is right up there.”

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